Movie Nation

We’ve had a few films about Elvis Presley told from his point of view, and one from that of his controlling huxter manager, Col. Tom Parker. So it’s long past time for one from that of his longtime love and ex-wife, Priscilla.

Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” is a mildly lurid, creepy and wholly credible account of the life of Priscilla Beaulieu, groomed from age 14 to be the literal “little” woman who kept “the home fires burning” for the King of Rock’n Roll.

Cailee Spaeny delivers a suppressed and yearning to break free performance in the title role in a movie that doesn’t give Mrs. Presley much in the way of fireworks as she struggles to gain agency in her life from a man who was, from her early teens (14) her entire life.

Spaeney, who gained some attention from TV’s “The First Lady,” is the breakout star here. But Coppola’s cleverest touch was casting Jacob Elordi of TV’s “Euphoria” as Elvis, who literally towers over the “little girl” in pretty much every scene.

Elordi and Coppola’s version of Elvis smoked and cursed a lot more than we might remember. But he was eight inches taller than even the fully grown Priscilla, whom the 20something pop superstar and Army private courted from junior high past graduation before finally marrying her when she was 22 and he was 32.

Elordi grows into the part, mastering the stammering, disarming drawl in later scenes, capturing the mercurial temperment, Elvis’s childishness, competitiveness, his disatisfaction with the trap of fame, his passion for guns and martial arts. But that all-important visual touch — the height difference — underscores the vast power imbalance in the relationship. Elvis makes Priscilla over, gives eye makeup advice and has her dye her hair. She’s his project, his pet, his plaything.

Elvis is in control from the start, working out ways to get around her military parents’ (Ari Cohen, Dagmara Dominiczyk) objections, charming her with a little gallantry, warning her about “getting carried away” in the sexual clenches.

His previous flings he discounts, newer flings (with Ann-Margret) he denies or downplays. And as he’s already developed the Army-bred habit of taking uppers to stay awake and downers to sleep, he’s the one who chillingly feeds her that first pill.

This Elvis dabbles in spiritualism, plows through books on it and tries to interest his project future wife in them and LSD and curses the bad movie scripts Col. Parker pushes on him. As Elvis manipulates Priscilla, he is at his most submissive in dealing with the unseen and unheard Parker. And every so often he lets flashes of abusive temper and rage show, a petulant, born-poor but always spoiled child now wholly unrestrained by his wealth and celebrity.

It’s a masterfully unsettling film, letting us be charmed by Presley’s country gentility and chivalry as he’s sweet-talking her and her parents, perversely getting his alcoholic business manager dad (Tim Post) to become this child’s legal guardian so she can move in and become “family,” getting her into “a good (Memphis) Catholic school” so she can at least graduate.

But in this teen girl’s fantasy life in Graceland, the anonymity (she’s kept from the public, mostly) is deflating, the silences are deafening, the tedium of primping for an often absent, sometimes unfaithful and all-powerful man soul-crushing.

The lack of fire in Spaeny’s mostly-passive performance may be accurate. Priscilla Presley supervised her own memoir and has a producing credit here, and in all things, “she should know.” But that choice narrows Priscilla’s story arc. As she grew up too fast (a “kept” under-age child gambling in Vegas with “The Memphis Mafia” as a teen), we never see her truly mature.

Yes, she makes friends and acts the adult as she becomes one. But there’s zero hint of an interior life, of an independent, intellectually curious woman yearning to break free from the tiny role Presley carved out for her.

At its best, Spaeny’s Priscilla shows us the face of a victim of sexual exploitation, objectifed into an underage “marriage” via oppressive grooming. At her worst, she’s a rival for Coppola’s vapid version of “Marie Antoinette,” a superficial and incomplete portrait of someone who, when she had agency, did little if anything to let us see the “real” her with it.

That makes “Priscilla” a film timely in its arguments against sexual exploitation, “grooming” and lowering the age of consent, but only as fascinating as its subject, who isn’t interesting in the least on her own.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity, sexual situations, smoking

Cast: Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Ari Cohen, Dagmara Dominczyk, Stephanie Moore and Tim Post

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sofia Coppola, based on the memoir by Priscilla Presley and Sandra Harmon. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:53

Christmas Day, a best seller becomes a George Clooney film starring Joel Edgerton and hits the big screen.

Movies like “Crypto Boy” remind us that no matter how current and “hot” the topic, the label “melodramatic” will never go out of style.

Melodramas use exaggerated tropes for plots and lean on character “types” so familiar that the entire enterprise feels comfortably familiar to the point where it’s predictable, beginning to end.

A “virtuous” hero or protagonist faces forces of corruption and is tested and tainted before triumphing over the cynical, the greedy and the venal. Sentiment turns into sentimentality and everybody learns “family” is what matters and life offers no “shortcuts” to happiness.

“Crypto Boy” is about a son of a struggling immigrant who stumbles into a short cut that will solve all their problems. He will be tempted and tested, betray those he loves and be gullibly tricked by those he’s just met. All for a currency and business model that’s been labeled “a Ponzi scheme” so often it should be on the prospectus you’re pitched when you consider investing.

Amir (Shahine El-Hamus) is a Dutch son of an Egyptian immigrant. He’s 20 years old, with friends and a steady job he loathes — making deliveries for his father Omar’s (Sabri Saad El-Hamus) “authentic Mexican” restaurant in Amsterdam.

That’s a dead end, and Amir knows it. The business Dad started still struggles, as he’s still feeding the neighbors as “family” for their many evening soccer-watching parties.

Amir has no education and no money and no prospect for bettering his lot.

But fate has him make a delivery at an office tower where the charismatic Roy Warner (Minne Koole) is preaching to his staff, possible investors and other believers.

“Don’t work for money. Let money work for YOU!” Figure it out, folks. “Hard work is taxed. Wealth ISN’T.”

Fate and coincidence, major elements of melodramas, intervene again when Amir tries to hustle up a job at Warner’s CryCore Capital. An old friend from the ‘hood, a rapper and influencer, is dodging a meeting with Roy. Amir glad-hands him, “old neighborhood” chats him up, and the next thing he knows, he’s “closed” the deal.

Roy gives him a bonus and a job. He’ll join the Dutch bros selling this crypto day trading via app scheme, with money coming in and going out and every day producing a one-to-three-percent return. It’s a million dollar business, Roy crows (in Dutch with subtitles, or dubbed) about to become a BIG business.

Meanwhile, there’s trouble on the farm at the restaurant. Developers want to redevelop Dad’s block and jack up his rent. Amir gets to be the Big Man, paying Dad’s rent and talking up crypto to the Old Man’s friends.

We’ve seen all this coming (the picture is quite slow in getting staerted), and we know where all this is going.

How long before the shifting money from account to account thing starts to look fishy? How long before Roy’s extracurricular pharmaceutical habit catches on with Amir? With older Omar taking over bicycle deliveries, how many minutes will pass before the inevitable happens and Amir’s loyalty is given its ultimate test?

It’s all somewhat watchable and absolutely predictable, and Shahine El-Hamus makes an engaging lead playing a character with no time for love, just a bestie (Isabelle Kafando), no time to truly “study” crypto when all he really needs to know is how to persuade people and spread the Gospel According to Roy.

Shahine’s brother Shady El-Hamus directed and co-wrote this immigrants-and-crypto melodrama. And their father, Sabri El-Hamus, a veteran Egyptian-Dutch actor, brings gravitas and heart to Omar, a classic self-made immigrant success story whose success is both limited, and an object lesson in “there are no shortcuts.”

Koole is a rough and menacing Zuckerbergesque villain.

But the predictability becomes a real problem as the narrative dawdles before getting to its crypto point, and meanders a bit as it drifts towards its predetermined finale. More “local color” and “scheme explained” scenes and a little less melodrama would have made all the difference in this crypto variation of an age-old formula.

Rating: TV-MA, drug abuse, some violence, brief nudity, profanity

Cast: Shahine El-Hamus, Minne Koole, Sabri Saad El-Hamus, Loes Schnepper and
Isabelle Kafando

Credits: Directed by Shady El-Hamus, scripted by Shady El-Hamus and Jeroen Scholten van Aschat. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

Shailene, Penelope Cruz, and Italian cars — racing ones.

Dec. 25, Neon releases this epic in the States. But I’ve shared the longer, cooler “Sky” Brit trailer, for your motoring, Enzoing pleasure.

This one has an unknown or TV known cast and a whiff of Oscar buzz.

Sofia Coppola tells us the story of “Priscilla.”

Titillatingly transgressive and deliriously blasphemous, “Dicks: The Musical” barrels through the “Oh no they didn’ts” fast and furiously, a movie so self-conciously gay, outrageous, rude and gay again that one wonders if only George Takei should be allowed to review it.

But we all know “Oh MY” would never do.

Raunchy, vulgar, campy and lower-than-lowbrow, it’s a cult film based on a cult musical and decidedly not for every taste. It’s the sort of spoof that religious cranks could embrace because it plays with their darkest “projected” phobias. No, not the pizza parlor thing.

“Look, Ethel! ‘They’ ARE into bestiality, incest and a Gay and Gay Friendly ‘God!'”

But get past the shock value of it all, the jolt of having “SNL” standout Bowen Yang lead one and all in a closing chorus of “God is a (gay slur that starts with “f” and sounds like “maggot”), and just one question hangs over the afterglow, or if you prefer aftertaste.

Is it funny?

Yeah, it pretty much is. Spit-takes, giggles, guffaws and airless, jaw-dropping “Oh no they DIDN’Ts” are scattered throughout this film starring the guys who conceived it — Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp. It’s brought to the screen by the cinema’s reigning shock jock, Larry Charles, who graduated from “Seinfeld” to “Religilous” and assorted “Borat” outrages, a director who knows where the laughs are and never ever hesitates to step over the line.

“Dicks” is about two big city sales “bros” — womanizers, woman-users, gauche yard dogs in every meaning of the word. But Craig (Sharp) and Trevor (Jackson) are but filling a void at the center of their empty lives. One grew up without a father, the other without a mother.

Yes, they’re twins, separated at birth. And it takes several minutes, a couple of double entendre production numbers about how “I’ll Always Be on Top” and a vamp by Megan Thee Stallion, their new “lady boss,” because such creatures now exist to them, before they figure out all this singing about how “No one understands what I’ve been through” is in vain.

Craig and Trevor know exactly what each other have been through because they’re “identical” (ahem) twins.

Once they figure that out, there’s nothing for it but to find a way to reconnect their parents “Parent Trap” style. The problem is, Evelyn (Megan Mullally SINGS!) is a wheelchair-bound ditz who probably doesn’t need a wheelchair. And Dad (Nathan Lane at his Nathan Laniest) realized he was gay, “queer as a three dollar bill,” a long time ago.

The movie, with a few sidebars into the realm of “sewer boys,” is as simple as that — comically misguided parental match-making, which with sexuality now being embraced as a “fluid” thing, isn’t all that far-fetched, a lot of sight gags (fake movie/play posters with a gay bent — “Lube!” is the word now that “Grease!” isn’t) — and a flurry of funny outtakes under the credits.

But Sharp and Jackson, wholly immersed in characters they’ve been taking over-the-top for years, are a hoot. Lane is a hoot-and-a-half, especially in the outtakes. Yang reminds us he will say, do or sing anything to get a laugh. Ms. Stallion leans into her raunchy brand with brio.

And Mullally, a gay icon among gay icons, all but steals the show — singing with a lisp, mastering the electric wheelchair as sight gag, indulging in all the openly-expressed vulgarisms network TV didn’t allow her to vamp on “Will & Grace.”

If you’re easily offended, or even have a modest vulgarity/raunch threshold, “Dicks” isn’t/aren’t for you. But in a midnight showing amongst the also-not-easily-shocked lovers of cult comedy dirty laughs, “Dicks” would be hard to beat. Ahem.

Rating: R, for all the reasons you’d expect, and then some, honey

Cast: Josh Sharp, Aaron Jackson, Megan Mullally, Nathan Lane, Megan Thee Stallion and Bowen Yang

Credits: Directed by Larry Charles, scripted by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp. An A-24 release.

Running time: 1:26

We could all use something a little sunny of Middle Eastern origin right about now. This autobiographical (“ish”) dramedy by writer-director Maryam Keshavarz fills that need.

“The Persian Version” tells us the story of an LGBTQ Iranian-American daughter trying to “understand” and appreciate her not-quite-estranged mother, to heal the rift between them.

Think of the film as “The Joy Luck Club” with Iranian immigrants, as imagined by Gurinder “Bend it Like Beckham” Chadha. Yes, there’s music. And dancing.

It’s meandering and a little messy, and voice-over narrated almost to death. But the vivacious presence of newcomer Layla Mohammadi as spitfire daughter Leila and Liousha Noor as Shireen, her stern, disapproving “Strength of Silence” mother carry it with flashes of snark, spite and soul.

The first act is mostly about Leila, her life — gay, divorced, still calling her “ex” — and her beefs with her family. The second half is Leila’s mother’s life unraveled for her daughter’s and our inspection, including the “scandal” in Iran that pulled the family out of that country in the ’60s, as acted-out and narrated by younger Shireen (Kamand Shafieisabet).

“I come from two cultures that used to be really in love with each other” Leila narrates — often to the camera. But Iran and American broke up. For most of her life, she’s been a “child of divorce,” “too Iranian in America, too American in Iran.”

Somehow, as the only daughter in a family of eight sons, she made her own way, got through grad school and followed her dream of “being the next Martin Scorsese,” making movies.

Her mother doesn’t approve of her sexuality, her stubbornness and her life choices. But Leila, with help from her live-in grandmother (Bella Warda, “screen presence” personified), she gets a handle on Mom’s struggle just as she learns she’s pregnant from a one-night-stand with a guy (Tom Byrne) Leila confused for a “cross-dresser”at a Halloween costume party.

He’s not gay. He’s “in ‘Hedwing and the Angry Inch” at a theater across town. And Max couldn’t help but be turned-on by Leila’s provocative “burkini” (bikini under a half-burka) costume for the night.

Messy? You don’t know the half of it. Keshavarz (“Circumstance” and “Viper Club”) takes us through Leila’s childhood, reducing her eight-man crew of brothers to “types,” dissects her parents’ marriage, embraces her mother’s real estate broker connection with immigrant buyers and skims over what Leila might do with this “relationship” that resulted in a baby when she’s pretty seriously invested in the whole lesbian thing.

Max? “He’s a thespian, not a lesbian,” because somebody needed to say it.

The narrative is a tad confusing in a “Which part of the timeline are we on now?” sense. And the structure makes “Persian Version” play like two movies grafted onto one another with the shared crutch of endless voice-over narration to make it all come together.

But there are moments of tear-jerking warmth and transgressive ebulliance.

Being women, mother and daughter could travel to Iran in the ’80s during the Iran-Iraq War without the risk of being drafted. But little Leila from the “good Muslim family” took it on herself to free the Ayatollah’s proles by smuggling “Michael Jackson, Prince and Cyndi Lauper” cassettes into the Islamic Republic.

A courtyard production number of Iranians dancing and interpreting “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” is the gushy, life-affirming jolt of cuteness you didn’t know you needed right now.

Mohammadi, who’s had one-off roles on a few U.S. TV series, announces her leading lady presence with authority here, coquettishly playing to the camera and the viewer as she narrates her self-proclaimed “f–k-up,” status, eye-rolls her mother’s belief in “Shia magic realism” in moments of crisis and brushes by the menfolk in the family, save for dad’s need for a heart transplant.

The entire enterprise is a tad ungainly, rigidly structured in two halves but drifting off mother-daughter message with scenes of adorable cuteness and deflating patriarchical sexism in Islamic form. Shireen was forced to marry at 13, for instance.

Our writer-director seems to go easy on her villains here, mainly because she’s grown up enough to recognize one’s own responsibility for “living my truth” and being a happy, unselfish human being.

“The Persian Version” goes astray here and there. It pulls a few punches and leans on “cute” and near endless voice-over exposition. But it plays, and it’s the sweetest thing we’re likely to see with anything Middle Eastern about it this fall, and is worth seeing just for that.

Rating: R for language and some sexual references

Cast: Layla Mohammadi, Niousha Noor, Kamand Shafieisabet, Bijan Daneshmand, Bella Warda and Tom Byrne

Credits: Scripted and directed by Maryam Keshavarz. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:47

Movies that use our remembered love of the cinema experience of our youth can’t help but be sentimental. From “The Last Picture Show” to “Cinema Paradiso,” “Four Hundred Blows” to “The Fabelmans,” filmmakers have found that their nostalgia for the Magic of the Movies resonates with many a film fan.

Films about the Third World version of that experience are often built around a traveling cinema that shows movies to remote villages in India — where this still happens, as “The Cinema Travelers” and other films remind us — and elsewhere, a way of bringing filmed entertainment to the off-the-grid/pre-TV-set-in-every-home masses.

“Once Upon a Star” is a Thai variation on that theme, with a Thai twist in the way this “truck cinema” was presented in villages and towns like Lopduri and Nakhem Sowen and Phitsanulok. It’s a very slow, faintly romantic drift into sentiment and nostalgia that could benefit from a little cutting for pace, just so long as you don’t edit out the “sweet.”

Manit (Sukollawat Kanarot) heads a truck troupe sponsored by Hermit Holder Playing Cards and Osotthepuayada Pharmaceuticals. Aged driver Man (Samart Payukaroon) and hunky young concession stand operator Kao (Jirayu La-ongmanee) travel the backroads and mud-paths of 1970 Thailand, taking care to avoid communist-controlled “Red Zones,” showing their movies to those without electricity, TV or cinema.

The Thai twist to all this is that the films aren’t projected with sound. It was cheaper to hire “dubbers,” actors who’d “perform” the film, and during “commercial” breaks, plug the patent medicine that they were there to sell, their real reason for being on the road.

Their corporate overlords are quite strict. Manit has to do all the dubbing, no matter how often “Hey, is that supposed to be a GIRL’S voice? (in subtitled Thai, or dubbed) is shouted from the peanut gallery. He drops the needle on records that provide the background music, and vocalizes such sound effects as he deems necessary.

But by 1970, audiences were demanding more, and competing troupes have multi-voice casts, including women, putting Manit’s crew at a terrible disadvantage. Kao might be an aspiring actor himself, but he can see the real problem is not having a woman on their dubbing team.

A newspaper ad brings lovely Rueangkae (Nuengthida Sophon) to their attention. She’s evasive about her experience, and her personal past. But she’d love to make money to go to typing school so she can become a secretary. She’ll do. She instantly ads credibility to their endless cycle of “dubbed” dramas and action films starring Thailand’s most popular actor, Mitr Chaibancha.

But as Manit and Kao both take a shine to the woman they call “Kae,” you can see where this is going. Piecing together her back story via hints and a few drunken admissions doesn’t really scare either of them off.

There’s good if not swooning chemistry between the leads, and the portrait of Vietnam War era rural Thailand is novel. A cute touch in Nonzee Nibibutr’s film is the selection of banjo and yodeling Thai “country” music on the soundtrack, which gives the movie a jaunty touch which the pacing and self-seriousness of the story doesn’t capitalize on.

Yes, the quartet has seen the black and white TVs in the larger towns they visit. Yes, some traveling cinemas are already shifting over to projecting with sound.

Manit’s “You’ve got a bright future ahead of you” speech to Kae is either blinded by love, or just a lie.

There’s enough material here — encounters with soldiers and monks and rural rednecks, the possible love triangle, dub-offs with their arch rivals and the like — that this picture could have bounced by, never pausing to get mired in the mud, which it often does.

A lighter touch — it really wants to be a sentimental, downbeat comedy — might have made this yodeling Thai melodrama sing. As it is, it only hums along here and there, carried by its sweetness and superficially developed characters.

Rating: TV-14, profanity, smoking, drinking

Cast: Nuengthida Sophon, Sukollawat Kanarot, Jirayu La-ongmanee and Samart Payukaroon

Credits: Directed by Nonzee Nimibutr, scripted by Ek Iemchuen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:!7

This period piece looks wicked fierce.

“Prison is no place for a young lady.”

The class conscious over-achiever, the “destined for greatness” ego, the epic scale and Black Sabbath and Ozzy’s “War Pigs” set the tone.

This looks more like a sure thing than the Joaquin? As Napoleon? earlier takes did.

Thanksgiving.